As a sometime Apple developer I do welcome this. Hopefully it will legitimise some of the grey (non-official) toolchains and support the development of tools and community that much of the rest of the software development world enjoys, and people won't be tied solely to Apple's own dev tools.
Does anybody else think it's a little strange though? To have open source tools solely to target a closed platform? I haven't used Swift myself but from what I've seen it seems to be something like Javascript with libraries for iOS, perhaps with a few semantic adjustments. Would that be a fair assessment?
I can't imagine it being used for much else beyond developing for iOS devices. Perhaps Macs. So while it's free as in "beer", but could it truly be said to be free as in "speech" in any substantial fashion?
Does anybody else think it's a little strange though? To have open source tools solely to target a closed platform? I haven't used Swift myself but from what I've seen it seems to be something like Javascript with libraries for iOS, perhaps with a few semantic adjustments. Would that be a fair assessment?
I can't imagine it being used for much else beyond developing for iOS devices. Perhaps Macs. So while it's free as in "beer", but could it truly be said to be free as in "speech" in any substantial fashion?